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Table Of Contents
» Introduction And Quality Samples
» What You're Going To Need
» Rip Your VOBs And Index Your Movie
» Set Up The Frameserver And Fix The Aspect Ratio
» Setting Up XviD's First Pass
» Setting Up XviD's Second Pass

There were some errors in the original tutorial as well as some important steps I left out. These have
since been fixed and updated in the full text of the article. For a list of what I changed, fixed, and added,
please see the change log.
The Problem I Was Trying To Solve
I played with DivX for hours on end. I tinkered with FLAC audio. I got sick and tired of playing around with
settings, encoding video for hours, only to achieve sub-par results. I wanted a way to copy a movie file off the
disc and onto my hard drive in at decent enough quality to not need the disc while keeping the file size
reasonable under control. Some will debate that I did not keep the file size under control but I think I did for a
video file worthy of replacing the disc. Finally, I wanted to do it will all freely available tools and utilities, codecs
and all.
What's The Skinny On Encoding Time, Quality, Etc.
Total encoding time from start to finish with VirtualDubMod was 7 hours and 6 minutes for a 2 hour 10 minute
movie, with roughly a 2 hour first pass and a 5 hour second pass. The system I encoded it on is running a
Pentium 4 2.4C GHz processor with 512 MB of DDR 400 RAM. Your results may very based on your system
specifications but it's safe to expect roughtly 2.5x to 3.5x the length of your movie for encoding. Why so long?
Because the quality's dang good. Let it run overnight if the time is a problem for you.

Here are a few frame captures from my test project. As you can see, XviD did a fantastic job with no visible
artifacts and great color grading. Take special note of the fact that dark colors like blacks and smooth transitions
of colors don't look blocky and pixelated at all.

The final file's resolution is 720x306 (removed letterboxing and corrected aspect ratio to 2.35, will explain later)
and looks excellent when maximized and playing full screen. I've tested full screen playback on both 1024x768
and 1280x800 resolutions and it looks very good.

However, this amazing quality comes at a price, and that price is filesize. The 2 hour 10 minute movie clocks in
at 1.79 GB as reported by Windows. This was quite a bit larger than my initial target of 1 GB, but after
discovering the benefits of the higher quality I am OK with the extra size. Given the rapidly increasing size of
hard drives these days anyway, getting a movie under 2 gigs isn't too bad space-wise. Overall, the movie went
from 4.89 GB in VOB files down to 1.79 GB in XviD, 36.6% of its original size while retaining virtually all of the
quality of the original.
What You're Going To Need
This tutorial assumes you have all of the following installed and in working order. Any questions about these
projects should be forwarded to their respective authors or contributors, not me. If for some reason these links
are broken, check for more updated versions of these programs at VideoHelp.com, which is one of the best
resource sites I've ever found when it comes to computer video.
Codecs
» Koepi's XviD Binary
Grab the latest stable XviD binary from Koepi's site.
» AC3Filter
This handles the playback of the AC3 audio that we're going to mux into the final movie file.
Utilities
» DVD Decrypter
Rips the necessary VOB files off the DVD disc. Especially useful for encrypted discs and content.

» DGMPGDec DGIndex
This tool will take the unencrypted VOB files and create an indexed D2V project file. It also outputs your AC3
audio stream in the process.

» VFAPI Reader
This tool is used in conjuction with DGIndex to frameserve the MPEG content in your VOB files to
VirtualDubMod for encoding.

» AC3 Delay Corrector and GfaWin32.ocx

If your AC3 files end up with small delays this utility will fix the delays to maintain your audio/video sync. Make
sure you also download GfaWin32.ocx and put it in the same directory as your AC3 Delay Corrector files or the
program will crash.

» VirtualDubMod
You'll need this app to do the actual encoding. We'll also fix some aspect ratio and letterboxing issues and mux
in the AC3 audio with this tool.

Rip Your VOBs

I'm not going to spend too much time discussing the whole process of using DVD Decrypter to rip off your VOB
files because there are plenty of guides that cover the process just fine. Instead, here's the quick instructions to
get you moving along.

Put the DVD in your drive and fire up DVD Decrypter. Make sure you're operating in IFO mode, not File mode.
You can change this by going to the Mode menu and choosing IFO.

Next go to the Edit menu and click Select Main Movie PGC. This will select the longest program chain on the
DVD, which is presumably the movie itself. If the duration looks right on the Input tab than it's probably the right
program chain. Make sure that all of your chapters are selected and that you set the output directory and click
the big decrypt button. This process could take anywhere from a few minutes to up to an hour depending on the
size of the files and the speed of your computer and DVD drive. Once finished, however, you'll have a set of
numbered VOBs on your hard drive that are ready to be indexed.
Index Your Movie And Grab Your AC3 Audio
Load up DGIndex, which is going to do double duty and index our VOB files for frameserving as well as output
our AC3 audio file for muxing back in later. Go to Open under the File menu and select all your VOBs and click
Open.
You should then be bombarded with a file listing of all the VOBs you just selected. Make sure they're all there
and that they are in numerical order. Once correct, click OK.

Now select Preview from the File menu. The movie should start playing and DGIndex will open up a status
window displaying the information it's collecting. Let the preview run for about 5 minutes to ensure that it gathers
enough information.

In the screens above you can see both the preview video and the statistics window. As is quite apparent in the
preview video, there is a huge aspect ratio problem in the source video. Why is it stretched like that? DGIndex is
interpreting it as 16:9 widescreen, when in reality most movies are shot in a wider aspect ratio such as 2.35:1 or
1.85:1. This isn't a problem, in fact we'll capitalize on this later when we set up VirtualDubMod to encode.

Now take a look at the statistics window. As you can see, the movie was interpreted as 16:9. Again, that's OK,
we'll fix it later. More importantly, look at what's displayed in the Video Type box. It it says Film, you'll need to
perform an additional step before we output the indexed D2V file. If you're encoding a movie that was released
in theaters, chances are it will be film. Close the statistics window.

Let's set up DGIndex to demux our AC3 audio for us. Go to the Audio menu, choose Output Method, and select
Demux Tracks. When we save our project, the AC3 audio track selected in the Audio > Track Number menu will
be dumped to an AC3 file for us. In most cases, the standard English audio track is track number 1, but if you
want something else make sure to verify which track number it is and select the appropriate one. You could also
select Demux All Tracks from the Output Method menu and listen to them later to find the right one.

Now if the statistics window reported that your video type was Film, go to the Video menu, choose Field
Operation, and select Forced Film. This will force our output to be at 23.976 frames per second, which is the
correct framerate for movies. Fixing aspect ratios isn't that big of a deal, but screwing up framerates can be a
royal pain, especially if you ever have any hope of getting your audio and video synchronized. However, the
movie I encoded has perfect audio/video sync and that's what we're going for.

Finally, select File > Save Project to save your D2V file. I like to name it something informative, like
"NameOfMovie.d2v" but it's completely up to you. Your AC3 file (or files, if you selected Demux All Tracks) will
also be dumped in this directory.
Once it's finished indexing, which should only take a few minutes, shut down DGIndex.
Fixing Delays In Your AC3 Audio
Check out the filename of the AC3 file that DGIndex dumped out for you. If it states a delay (anything other than
"DELAY 0ms") we need to fix this delay to maintain the audio/video sync of our final movie file. Thanks to AC3
Delay Corrector, this is a fairly simple processes. Load up AC3 Delay Corrector. If the program crashes right
away, you need to get a hold of the GfaWin32.ocx file and put it in the same directory as your AC3 Delay
Corrector files. The link to download GfaWin32.ocx can be found on the "What You're Going To Need" page.

Next to the Source File box click the button with three dots. Locate your desired AC3 file and open it. AC3 Delay
Corrector is smart and automatically interprets the delay in the filename and sets all the options for you. All
that's left to do is click the Write button. When it's finished writing it will haved dumped a delay corrected AC3
file in the same directory with "_fix" appended to the filename. Close AC3 Delay Corrector and use the new AC3
file from here on out.

Building The Frameserver With VFAPI Reader

Congratulations, this is the easiest part of this entire tutorial! Fire up VFAPI Reader. Click the Add File button
and select your D2V project. Another screen will pop up asking you where you would like to save the AVI file.
Pick a location and a name, leave the other options alone, and click OK.
Now just click the Convert button. We've now got an AVI file that will frameserve the MPEG data from the VOB
files ready for encoding and an AC3 audio track ready for muxing. Close VFAPI Reader and move on to
VirtualDubMod.
Removing Letterboxing And Fixing The Aspect Ratio
Go to the File menu, choose Open Video File, and select the AVI file that VFAPI Reader just created. You
should be able to scrub through the video by dragging the slider at the bottom of the window.

What is letterboxing? If you've ever watched a widescreen movie you've seen it. Basically, it's the use of those
black bars above and below the image to show the movie correctly. Why don't we want the movie to retain it's
letterboxing when we encode it? Well, there's really no reason to keep it. Media players on computers can
handle video files of any resolution, so why not make our movie a size that exactly fits the video data? Not only
that, but if you include the black bars in the video file they're going to be wasting some our precious bitrate to
store their information.

Instead, we can chop off those black bars and use all of our bitrate on the video, which is the important part
anyway. Another added benefit is that when you play it back in a media player you get the darkest black your
monitor can display on either side of the video, not the washed out "bright" black of a compressed video file.

To set up this cropping go to the Video menu in VirtualDubMod and select Filters. VirtualDubMod has a list of
built in filters you can use to modify the output it produces. You can see the cropping button in the bottom right
hand corner, but it's not enabled yet. Click the Add button, choose the Null Transform filter, and click OK to
return to the filters window.

Now click the cropping button to adjust our cropping settings. Scrub to a frame of your movie where the edges
of the video are pretty well defined. Drag the tops and bottoms of the image down until they get pretty close to
the edge of the image and then use the up and down arrows in the Y1 Offset and Y2 Offset boxes for pixel-
perfect control. Make sure that both the Y1 Offset and Y2 Offset values are even numbers. You may need to
cheat the actual boundry a little bit to do this but it's better to cut off a line of image than it is to leave a line of
black bar. Finally click OK.
You won't see the cropping in the list of filters, but it's important to note that the cropping will take place before
any other filters we use.

Next we need to apply a resize filter to fix that pesky aspect ratio problem. Click the Add button in the filters
window again and add a resize filter. When you click OK you'll be presented with an options dialog that let's you
set the new video size. Now here's where a little bit of math comes into play. To keep the highest resolution
possible, we want to retain our 720 pixel width. We just want to "squash" the video into the correct aspect ratio.

What you need to do is divide 720 by the desired aspect ratio to get the correct height for our new video. You'll
need to look on the back of the DVD box to find what aspect ratio it was shot in. Some common ratios include
2.35:1, 1.85:1, 16:9, and 4:3. To simplify the math, here's a basic table that provides the width and height values
for different aspect ratios.
Common Aspect Ratio Real Aspect Ratio Video Frame Size
2.35 2.35:1 720x306
1.85 1.85:1 720x390
16:9 1.78:1 720x404
4:3 1.33:1 640x480

Please note that with the 4:3 aspect ratio we can acheive the greatest quality by changing our width, not the
height.

Type in your new width and height values in their respective boxes on the resize filter options screen. Under
filter mode I prefer Lanczos3 for the highest quality but feel free to choose something else if you like. Do not
check the Interlaced checkbox and especially do not check the Expand Frame And Letterbox Image checkbox,
because that would undo all the work we're doing right now. Finally, click the Show Preview button. Scrub
through your video and make sure that it looks right and that you chopped off all the necessary black bars
earlier. This is what our output video file will look like. If it looks good to you, close the preview window and click
OK on the resize options screen to return to the filter list. Click OK to close the filter list.

Setting Up XviD's First Pass

Here comes the complicated parts. We need to set up VirtualDubMod to run two projects in batch processing
mode. The first project it runs will the be the first pass by the XviD encoder, which won't actually output
anything. Instead it will collect information about each frame to give you higher quality results when it actually
encodes on the second pass.
Go to the Video menu and make sure that Full Processing Mode is selected. Next, go to the Video menu and
select Compression. This will bring us to the the screen that allows us to configure our encoder options. Select
the XviD MPEG-4 Codec from the list on the left and click the Configure button.

Now we need to configure the encoder for it's first pass. Use the following settings.
Setting Value
Profile @ Level AS @ L5
Encoding Type Twopass - 1st Pass

If there are any zones defined in the Zones box, select and apply the following settings to each one.
Setting Value
Start Frame # 0
Rate Control Weight 0.00
Begin With Keyframe Checked
Greyscale Encoding Unchecked (unless your video isn't in color)
Chroma Optimizer Enabled Checked
BVOP Sensitivity 0

Now click on the Advanced Options button. Use the following settings on the Motion tab.
Setting Value
Motion Search Precision 6 - Ultra High (reduce for smaller files)
VHQ Mode 4 - Wide Search (reduce for smaller files)
Use Chroma Motion Checked
Turbo Unchecked
Frame Drop Ratio 0
Maximum I-Frame Interval 240 if you needed to select Forced Film in DGIndex, otherwise set to 300
Cartoon Mode Unchecked (unless you're encoding something like anime)

Use the following settings on the quantization tab.

Setting Value
Min I-Frame Quantizer 1
Max I-Frame Quantizer 31
Min P-Frame Quantizer 1
Max P-Frame Quantizer 31
Min B-Frame Quantizer 1
Max B-Frame Quantizer 31
Trellis Quantization Unchecked
Finally, on the Debug tab use the following settings.
Setting Value
Automatically Detect Optimizations Selected
FourCC Used XVID
OutputDebugString Debug Level 0x0
Print Debug Info On Each Frame Unchecked
Display Encoding Status Unchecked

Now click OK to close the advanced options window and click OK to close the XviD configuration window.
Lastly, click OK to close the video compression window.

Go to the File menu and choose Save As. Make sure the file type is Audio-Video Interleave (*.avi) and give it a
file name. Most importantly, check the box that says "Don't run this job now; add it to job control so I can run it in
batch mode." Click the Save button. That's it for the first pass.

Setting Up XviD's Second Pass

Don't close VirtualDubMod or reopen the file or anything. Just go back to the Video menu and select
Compression again. Click Configure to open the encoder options window. I'm only going to give you the settings
you need to change. Leave everything else the way it was before.
Setting Value
Encoding Type Twopass - 2nd Pass

For high quality video like the one in the screenshots, toggle the Target Bitrate/Target Size button to Target
Bitrate. Type 1500 in the box to its right. That'll give the video a bitrate of 1500 kbps which produces excellent
quality video.

If you want to aim for a particular file size toggle the button to Target Size and click the Calc button to open the
bitrate calculator. Type in your target size (in kilobytes) and leave the subtitles box at 0. Make sure the
Container Format is set to AVI-OpenDML. Type in your movie's duration. If you checked Forced Film in
DGIndex select 23.976 (FILM), if not select 29.97 (NTSC). Select AC3 as your audio format and choose the
average bitrate of your AC3 audio file. This can be found by looking in the file name of the AC3 file we outputted
earlier using DGIndex. Finally, click OK to close the bitrate calculator. Remember, only perform these steps if
you're aiming for a particular file size.

Click OK to close the XviD options window and click OK to close the video compression window. Now we've got
to add our AC3 audio to be muxed in on the second pass. Go to the Steams menu and select Stream List. Click
the Add button and select your AC3 audio file from earlier. After a short pause as VirtualDubMod parses the
AC3 audio, it should show up in the stream list. Click OK to close the stream list box.

Go back to the File menu and select Save As. Type in the same name you did before (taking care to select the
AVI file type) and again check the "Don't run this job now" box. Click Save to close the window. Now open the
job control box by going to the File menu and selecting Job Control. Both the first pass job from earlier and the
second pass job we just configured should be listed. Your box will differ from the screenshot below because I've
already finished encoding. Just click the Start button and VirtualDubMod will start the long and arduous process
of encoding your movie. This would be a good time to go and do something else for... quite a while. Once the
project starts running you can open a status window from the main VirtualDubMod window that will display its
progress and let you play with the priority settings.
After it's done you will have your beautiful new high-quality XviD movie file with AC3 audio. Good luck!